Thorner

NGL result was a bit satisfying for me after I posted this rough offhand breakdown yesterday Kinda lined up with the game. Fix the GT outright, shore up the D a little, profit

Some Kyle Wellwood in Mittestadt

Ya with Anderson it’s an availability thing. But it still comes to the same issue

Haha. Re: GDTs, I don’t really find them to be post-in-able if I’m not getting the game on cable - score updates are posted somehow instantly in thread and long before I see them on my stream, and they pop up while posting frequently, and are recognizable as “someone scored” posts immediately because the type in question are posted so diligently. My own issue. keep getting myself spoiled. Have to protect the integrity of the game experience! Lol

Says Adams was looking to stop gap to Levi Adams has clearly made up his mind we are living and dying by Levi - this one is my worried inference Lance says that Adams camp on/off record does NOT like their chances of locking up Portillo

Lance Lysowski also on the show Gotta say, if Lance is on the mark, the board certainly is dialed in to everything we plan to do moving forward...or maybe he just reads this site Reiterates that Adams has enough stockpiled now to put the team together and go for it. Says we need more depth D Said we need a goalie and that none of the guys we’ve had have been close to good enough and that they are still evaluating Comrie and UPL(lol) Says we need to shore up grit in bottom 6

I was banned for bringing in burgers with avocado For the record if you put a space between the @ Refuting it doesn’t send the notification tag

Why bother. He’s decent. Rick is so, so far beyond anyone else, no matter who calls the games will be a disappointment with the slightest comparison. Rick was one of the top reasons I’m a Sabres fan. It’s honestly a huge loss. Replace Dan and the new person would still greatly suffer by comparison. Even if there is a small improvement, it’s not enough/worth prioritizing that over a dude’s job who by all accounts is a good guy and does a decent job. No sense chasing what we can’t get

I was on that track from the start Agree. VO also generally tallies more assists than we’ve seen this year so far

Mitts might and probably will improve but he’s not going to undergo development like Tage and I fear, like Allen (who actually doesn’t even compare to Tage for the unlikelihood of rise) that one player like Tage going through a truly unprecedented swing and rise to prominence will have people thinking it’ll happen with other players failing to establish. Most times, the players don’t. Sometimes they do, though, and Tage is a good lesson to not give up too early. But players don’t rocket like he did: that’s a Tage thing He’s an insane exception to the standard. A truly odds-defying case. If that sort of development is projected onto other players, the uniqueness of it isn’t being appreciated enough. I understand the OP mentioned Mitts as a potential 3C still, and that is still possible.

The biggest thing is just the acceptance that it’ll never again be as good

Weirdly Marek went on a rant today to start his show, about how Sabres fans should be livid that Granato so limited Tage’s ice time in the third because he had a shot at tying the record. Honsstly, this didn’t cross my mind at all, seems kinda irrelevant and I don’t think it would rub the players the wrong way. Admittedly, I can’t go in the GDTs so I may have missed discussion on it yesterday. Seemed a nothingburger to me, though. Did this come up at all? - - - Another tidbit on the show I really found telling was that analyst Mike Rupp was on and he says he can basically judge whether a team is a “contender” based on looking at purely the 3rd line. I liked that and think it makes sense: our team for example, starting to look much better, but the traditional 3rd line is still a massive weak spot. Perhaps once that line resolved itself or rather, we resolve it, we’d take a further step.

He might win the Art Ross

It must be the visual because Lehner wasn’t just bad in shootouts, it was literally impossible to do a worse job

Ya I mean they are reasonable examples that kinda fit the “exceptions to the rule” thing I mentioned above, but even then, Comrie still represents a definitively different case ie riskier bet: Comrie had *played in* 28 nhl games prior to this season, in 9 years Markstrom played in 107 games before the year you say he became a starter. Including a season of 32 games Kuemper played in 131 games. A season with 30+. Campbell played 30+ in 2018 but I’ll definitely give you that one as that’s 8 years after draft anyways. He had 86 games before becoming a “starter” but like I said the bulk are after 8 years so that’s a good example Ullmark had played 127 games in a Sabre uniform sharing stater loads at times while putting up very good numbers before he became a “starter” in the year you said, come on on now Husso took 7 years, pretty good example Sorokin couldn’t get out of the Khl until 2020 - - - Comrie COULD be that guy. And you are right, it wasn’t really about discussing Comrie specifically anyways. In the end the disagreement in this case may yet again come down to timeline ie i expected improvement documented in net by now and you are still in the “waiting” phase. I think in light of other aspects of the team excelling it makes the inadequacy to SO FAR garner results in net less agreeable - be it by ineptitude, or, maybe more importantly, by design.

edit - I don’t think your take is “laughably wrong” at all - like I said, we may have to just disagree. I think it’s possible Comrie improves. The haha was just for the tactic - regardless of who Comrie played behind, the fact he wasn’t able to amount to more in 9 years isn’t wholly discountable. I’m not saying it’s definitive, he wouldn’t be the first to find later success by any means, merely that it’s doesn’t have “zero” negative connotation

I still don’t understand why they refused to go to Ullmark in shootouts over Lehner I don’t care if he was coming in cold. Lehner could simply not stop them

Yes, but I think those factors are all built-in to the principle, though, right? The record is reflective. If we’ve played difficult teams within the 25 games, it’s fitting we have 13 losses. I don’t think the roster we’ve assembled deserves a better fate. This is accounting for said context. It’s reflective, for example, of a young team. If we truly are undergoing the development we seek, if strength of schedule truly is a factor, here - our record will presumably also be reflective of the easier schedule, once it arrives. And assuming our record improves, it doesn’t then mean that, looking back, our record at this time wasn’t actually reflective: it still was/is. The curve would indicate the growth/schedule/system improvement/etc. Good young team getting better wouldn’t mean young team was “(THIS) good all along.” It means it achieved varying results tantamount to what might be expected, given context, at varying points along the way. The heart of the cliche, and that’s what it is, is fundamentally positive, in essence. The idea that you have the ability to control your own destiny. You make you own record. If you control what you can, and manage it well, the record will come to reflect it. The results aren’t potentially being hidden from you based on bad luck. This doesn’t mean we ignore all context for WHY a record is what it is - ie a young team’s struggles meaning that our record could be seen as both deserved yet likely to improve there are lots of indicators others have mentioned that point to us soon improving a LOT

Also, is your contention @nfreemanthat, so far, his work at goalie overall should be judged in your option as “Incomplete”? Is that a correct reading on my part? If so, does that evaluation shift if Comrie comes back and continues to play poorly? Do you then judge the results at the position so far? And if so, does the grade change back to incomplete if he brings in a new guy this offseason? When is the “so far” sample size big enough to say that “SO FAR” he hasn’t adequately addressed goaltending, is I guess my question

The fact he did not establish as a starter as of now undoubtedly IS evidence, though. If you don’t think the fact he hasn’t established as a starter, yet, 9 years after being drafted, has any bearing at all as evidence on the likelihood of him becoming a starter going forward.... ie, that we’d be perceiving the same likelihood from, say, the perspective of a touted prospect, fresh off being drafted, BEFORE said prospect committed 9 years to record of documented inability to seize the position.. we just won’t be able to agree on this one. The fact *I* haven’t seized the starter position is also, an extreme example, of why the “lack of evidence” argument doesn’t hold up on its own. Lack of evidence certainly can be evidence in and of itself - of course it can. The absence of evidence is important if the burden of proof is on Comrie - and it is. He’s not a Starter-Until-Proven-Otherwise. He’s not a starter, until he proves otherwise. If not, you are just asking to prove a negative, “prove he won’t THIS time”. I can’t. He might. But the fact he hasn’t, yet, in the past - over a reasonably large sample of years where he could theoretically have been GRANTED more games had he EARNED them, does in fact work against the likelihood he does in future.

It’s interesting. Wyshynski on the show mentioned that the Devils were much the same last season in many ways but were undone by atrocious GT. It really does sound like we COULD be that team. They found a G though - imperative we do the same

Jeff Marek today mentioned Dahlin as one of the league’s best hitters, and skaters

Is scoring still going up league wide?

position grade forwards A defence B goalie D overall - B OR forwards incomplete defence incomplete goalie incomplete

You logic comparison is poor because, in the case you mentioned, you’d be extrapolating “ good starter” numbers of a very small sample size going forward, over an amount of games he has no history of ever coming close to completing. It can happen, but it’s much less logically sound than comparing a period of time where he failed to establish as a starter in combination with a further, large period of time where the exact same results were achieved again, the burden of proof is on Comrie. Coming in and playing very poorly doesn’t gain benefit of the doubt in light of a career of failing to establish as a starter, for one reason, or another. That can even be for opportunity reasons. My argument isn’t that he’s bad. My argument is that he hasn’t shown the ability to establish as a starter. Until he does, the odds are against it, it’s not fairly classified as an unknown.